What role(s) did your later educational experiences play in where you are now academically? What curricular and extracurricular experiences shaped your outlook, goals, and abilities? Who were your most influential teachers and/or coaches? Why?
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this question and I have come up with nothing, well nothing big anyway. I remember once in elementary school, third grade I think, when we were separating into our SRA reading groups and I was one color but my friend was another so we had to be in separate groups. We did everything else together but we could not read together, that made no sense to either one of us. We both liked reading the same books, Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary if I remember correctly, but we had different color levels at school. Now I do not remember much from my childhood but the fact that this memory remains must mean something, perhaps I had already recognized on some level that our similar interests should have grouped us in the same reading group. Skip ahead to seventh grade when my family moved to Westerly and I started going to Babcock Middle, a huge culture shock to say the least. Fortunately, my science teacher had the practice of assigning a buddy to each new student that joined her class. I cannot say that my buddy became a best friend but she showed me around the school, introduced me to different groups of kids, invited me to sit with her at lunch and answered all my stupid questions. Being the new kid is always hard but this teacher had made it her responsibility to make it a little easier and I was truly grateful. I guess I have always carried that with me because I was always drawn to the new kids, always doing my best to ensure they didn't feel like outcasts. Thinking about high school, what I remember most are the teachers that pushed us to succeed, the ones that set expectations and then expected us to exceed them. Those are the teachers I remember by name, the ones I think about when someone asks me why I want to teach. I remember my chemistry teacher pushing me to explain why I got those results or why the results did not match my hypothesis. I remember my European History teacher and the discussions we would have connecting a past event to a current event and then trying to decide what that might mean for the future. I just realized that the teachers I remember most are the ones who thought and taught outside the box, the ones who left the textbook behind sometimes and let the students take the reins. I guess they are all part of the schema that I draw from when I see myself teaching.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about this question and I have come up with nothing, well nothing big anyway. I remember once in elementary school, third grade I think, when we were separating into our SRA reading groups and I was one color but my friend was another so we had to be in separate groups. We did everything else together but we could not read together, that made no sense to either one of us. We both liked reading the same books, Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary if I remember correctly, but we had different color levels at school. Now I do not remember much from my childhood but the fact that this memory remains must mean something, perhaps I had already recognized on some level that our similar interests should have grouped us in the same reading group. Skip ahead to seventh grade when my family moved to Westerly and I started going to Babcock Middle, a huge culture shock to say the least. Fortunately, my science teacher had the practice of assigning a buddy to each new student that joined her class. I cannot say that my buddy became a best friend but she showed me around the school, introduced me to different groups of kids, invited me to sit with her at lunch and answered all my stupid questions. Being the new kid is always hard but this teacher had made it her responsibility to make it a little easier and I was truly grateful. I guess I have always carried that with me because I was always drawn to the new kids, always doing my best to ensure they didn't feel like outcasts. Thinking about high school, what I remember most are the teachers that pushed us to succeed, the ones that set expectations and then expected us to exceed them. Those are the teachers I remember by name, the ones I think about when someone asks me why I want to teach. I remember my chemistry teacher pushing me to explain why I got those results or why the results did not match my hypothesis. I remember my European History teacher and the discussions we would have connecting a past event to a current event and then trying to decide what that might mean for the future. I just realized that the teachers I remember most are the ones who thought and taught outside the box, the ones who left the textbook behind sometimes and let the students take the reins. I guess they are all part of the schema that I draw from when I see myself teaching.